"QuakeFinder" is crowdsourcing earthquake warning system. It uses accelerometers in laptops, tablets, smartphones and special PC boards. The hypothesis is that tens of thousands of networked accelerometers with so-so signals may be useful for seismology, compared to few hundred professional seismometers drilled into bedrock. I saw some promising early studies, but lost track of the project.
The original accelerometers were supposed to save laptop disks before a laptop hit the ground. But then Apple put them into smartphones to measure orientation and location. Their cost has fallen to a few dimes.
